Winning vote share

It stands out that the top 36 spots were taken by the Conservatives.

Distribution of votes

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With our first-past-the-post system, we can also take a look at “wasted” votes. We define these as votes that have no bearing on the outcome. For winners it’s the vote margin by which they won, for the ones that did not win their district it’s the entirety of their votes. Wasted votes is a somewhat artificial system that does not necessarily reflect how parties would have performed under a different voting system.

First-past-the-post vs proportional representation

How would the parties have fared under a proportional representation system (PR) instead of first-past-the-post (FPTP)? There are many different kinds of proportional representation systems out there, but they generally try to approximate a seat distribution that mirrors the overall vote share. For simplicity we will simply take the overall vote share as a proxy for what a proportional representation system might have yielded. - The Liberals are the big winner of FPTP, as is Bloc Québécois. The Conservatives fair equally well under either system, and NDP and the Green Party are the losers under the current FPTP system.

how well each province is represented in terms of first-past-the-post vs proportional representation.

Alberta and Saskatchewan voters are a lot more diverse than the FPTP vote system may suggest, and the while the Conservatives got shut out of a couple of provinces, they still have sizeable support there. This kind of outcome is fairly typical for first-past-the-post systems, where the representation in parliament does not match the overall population well, especially when looking by province.

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This article and codes are reproduced from Jens von Bergmann’s “Elections fun” (published on 2019-10-22): https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2019/10/22/elections-fun/

The code for this post is available on GitHub.